lookingforhelp wrote:


Not to make it personal, but just to illustrate a point, I will tell you the biggest difference between me and you. read your post. You ask how to handle nice-looking women. You still think you can handle them. You see them and think about them, and think about fighting your desire for them, and think about them some more, and think again even more about how you can fight your desire to connect to them in thought, vision, fantasy, and maybe eventually one day something a bit more.

I do not try to handle them because I have admitted to myself that I am powerless over lust and cannot manage my own life using lust at all. So I do not fight them, do not think about them and how to wrestle with them. It's a different attitude because I have different beliefs than you do. Your frumkeit makes you attach them to you even more. You do not let them go.

I surrender, you struggle.

If you really let them go, then you could do the decent thing and see them as frail people - just as you and I are. People who have needs and need tefilos. Life is hard, and everyone has tzaros. Fantasy erases all that because it tells us to see them as sex toys for us..."ein isha ella l'noy!" And our struggle for 'madreigos' is really just arrogance. That arrogance converts these real women into objects - a cheftza to struggle with...or maybe even into 'disgusting shiksas' to disdain. As if disdain will keep us from drooling about their perfect figure and beautiful faces? A lie. Quite the reverse. Our 'disgust' is feigned. Pretending we are 'disgusted' by them and that they are 'evil', actually just ends up providing us with more license to lust after them even more for they are not really real people in the full sense any more. Heh. it always backfires. While in truth, we - you - worship them for their beauty and sweet feminine power. If not, why all the struggle with them? What's the draw? Why do we keep coming back to their 'ugliness' for more, like a dog returning to his vomit?...i guess they are not vomit to me, in reality, are they. Keep trying.

Acceptance of reality is often a lonely, scary thing. We even misuse Torah in order to avoid it.

It hurts to admit you - we - worship - yes, worship - them.

So my experience tells me to start with admitting they are people as frail as I am, that if I had been brought up with their nature and families, I might have become even worse than they are, and mayb, just maybe, I will be able to pray for their benefit. To really care for them instead of use them. To do what Hashem does - He shows His love for them (and everything in the briyah) and cares for them with His hashpo'oh every second. They have a mission in life. Each Jew and even each goy has a purpose in His plan. And if I find myself unable to just let her go, then I know one thing: I have elevated her to some degree of superhuman status. i worship her feminine power and it is time to bring her down to my own level. Frail, needy, real. Not lower than me - just equal. A fellow human being. I do that by praying honestly for her health, her family, her future and for her to come to have the right relationship Hashem wants her to have with HimHashem as you wish Hashem...just as He wants to have a certain relationship with you.

So simply put, it is really not about self control, but about actually believing differently than we do right now. And the first thing to do to practice that is to ignore these women. Stop practicing the drooling, the second looks and the obsessive thinking about them. Let them go. Accept that she - and certainly her body - has absolutely nothing to do with you. If you cannot accept that, you will know it, because you will keep right on fantasizing about her image and obsessing about her image.

The thing to do then is to let go of her 'object-ness' by praying for her. Not by self-reighteously praying for her to "do teshuvah and stop being such a slut"...heheh, that would just be furthering our arrogance and making her into veiter just an object. Once she is a bit less of a person, we lust a bit more with them. So we start by praying from the depths of your heart for her health and future, children, and relationship with hashem. Then you ask for each of these same things for your own wife just the same, and for your children, and for yourself.

If the first path of ignoring and surrendering what's not ours does not work for us, then we obviously are sicker and need more work so we move to the second path: sincere prayer for them.

If the prayer is sincere, the lust slips right off us and we can them move on with living without them in our lives and minds.

But if we find ourselves again and again fantasizing and obsessing, we just do it all over again. No problem. If it keeps up and does not work, then it means one thing: we still want them too much to let them go.

Saying that now, before trying the above, is meaningless. That just means we do not want to work at all. But if you really try to let the two paths above and it is still not working, then it simply means I still want her in my life - I am not really willing to surrender her.

If that is made clear, could you go on to admit just that? Or will you need to invent a philosophical or religious issue to excuse you...such as 'the yetzer hora makes me do it' (blaming G-d), or 'they just dress to pritzusdik' (blaming them), etc, etc.?

Good questions!

I'm reaching out. There's a girl in the office who is so friendly, and her outfits are usually tight with a low neckline. I have such a problem with this. All I see is someone saying "I want you." and I want her back. It's a mirage, but it doesn't feel that way. I imagine she will give me all the love and nurturing I crave. I cannot be in the same room with this girl without getting a turn on, feeling the blood drain from my head, and getting dizzy. I know myself well enough to know I would never actually touch her, but it definitely will lead to fantasies and mast***ation. This is why I'm writing about it - to expose this urge to the light and let it wither.

Hashem, You love me. I know You do. I love You too. I don't love this woman. I am an addict, and I want to fantasize about her and run away from all my problems. I am prepared to surrender this urge to You. Please, please take it away from me. Protect me in Your love; keep me sober and clean just for today. Thank You. That's much better. I'll be in touch.

I am coming up on 1 yr in SA, but still slip here and there with pictures of underdressed women on the internet and lusting over women on the street and at work. This is a struggle, and I feel on the inside that the obsession is isn't really gone. That Hashem has removed the obsession from the more insidious forms of acting out, but that I haven't surrendered some of the "lighter" stuff. I mean, if I've come this far, shouldn't I just beg Hakadosh Baruch Hu to finish off the obsession to the point where I'm living within the boundaries of halachah? I believe this will become my goal for the coming tekufa. If life has gotten so good for me in just one year of recovery, incomplete as it is, I cannot even imagine how good things might become if I really surrender my lust to Hashem. This is hard. I still crave the sense of love/acceptance/worth that fantasy and lust seem to offer.